Simon
13-03-2012 22:40:35
Some of us are never able to smash our work. That’s okay. Every semester, a small, forlorn pile of pottery would show up in the Free To Good Home box next to the dumpster, so if somebody wanted it, it was theirs. It’s okay. The hardest lesson in art, I think, is learning to fail, and admit failure, and learn to learn from it, without having to carry your failures with you like millstones. Pottery taught me that failure was inevitable, and that merely because I created it did not make it worth keeping, that hours spent trying to torture out art did not, in and of themselves, convey any particular grace. It taught me that no one painting, no one story, no one creative act is, itself, all that important. What matters is doing it over and over, until you get good. And then continuing to do it over and over. And that even when you’re good, you fail at least one pot out of ten. Que sera, sera. Don’t wallow. Cut it off the wheel. Do better on the next one.